Updated version of the M. R. James classic, starring John Hurt, 9.00 on BBC2 on Christmas Eve.

Good to see a seasonal ghost story (the only other horror I've found in the terrestrial TV schedules over the festive season is the Paris Hilton "Waxworks"), but I read this line in the TV Times feature on the programme and shuddered:-

'But where Hordern's* ghost was little more than a malevolent bedsheet, this version leaves much more to the imagination.'

Getting back on topic I'm quite looking forward to the Ghost story on Christmas Eve.
Especially as the Dirk Gently adaptation didn't do anything for me last week. Let's hope this one isn't a damp squib?

Did anyone else see this? I must admit to having been disappointed. John Hurt was excellent, as ever, but for me the original was superior in every respect. The modern-day setting seemed to work against this version, although some of the nursing home sequences were quite creepy.

I didn't think it was too darkly shot at all. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but rather better than I'd feared. It had little to do with the James' story beyond the title (before leaving the home, Hurt whispers in his wife's ear, 'Whistle, and I'll come for you!' Kudos to them for not making it a total Bogart/Bacall moment by having him add, 'You know how to whistle?'). I didn't see much need for the ring, and I thought showing the wife on the bed at the end was a misjudgement, made his fears too tangible. Overall though I felt it worked well as a psychological ghost story, with Hurt's character confronting the possibility of something much more terrible than a mere haunting and having his own scientific rationalism undermined. Some quite eerie moments too, even if the best of them were borrowed from Japanese horror and "The Haunting".

Last year the Beeb gave us a psychological take on "The Turn of the Screw", so revisions of classic ghost stories seems to be the course they're set on.

When I wrote too much of it was shot in the dark I was thinking specifically of the bedroom scenes when it does seem to me to be pitch black and I can't see a thing, and it goes on for a long time. I was straining to see something, even anything at all but it was pitch black. There was not even a crackle of static to break up the black.
I believe a filmakers skill is to have ambient light so that we are aware that the scene is in the dark but so that we can actually see what is going on. And I couldn't. I didn't think the BBC went in for dogmatic realism like that?
There were creepy moments but they took place in the light fortunately.
I was left thinking it was an awkward hybrid between a tv play and a radio play.

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